Game musings and news

[beatbandito]

Went back in time in the game deals thread and decided to update the conversation on Epic Store exclusivity deals with this (now old) post from the Ooblets devs about why they took the deal.

Obviously probably not universal, but "upfront, generous, guaranteed sales payment Epic's higher split than most other distributors" does seem reasonable both for epic to offer and the devs to take for anything indie. Doesn't specifically reference the free give-away games though.

[Grath]

On the other hand, Epic is only interested in indie games to exploit them - They tried to take an indie game that had just announced a Steam release date, bribe them to be exclusive, and refused to just list them in the Epic store for simultaneous release after the dev turned down Fortnite blood money.

[Upthorn]

Their intentions don't matter. Their overall business practices are better for indie developers than having steam as the only option.

The fact that they bribe for exclusivity and refuse non-paid simultaneous release is shitty, but it's still less shitty than the way Valve has been abusing its monopoly for years.

[Blossom]

"Minimum guarantee on sales" seems somewhat different than a bribe, here. Guaranteeing them payment as if the game had sold X number of copies, even if it sells less than X, is ... exactly what you want to do if you want to attract developers to a growing but not yet established platform.

If the game's a success on the Epic store, they don't come out ahead here. This wasn't a lump sum bonus. "Bribe" is loaded and, honestly, bullshit language.

[Upthorn]

If the game's a success on the Epic store, they don't come out ahead here. This wasn't a lump sum bonus. "Bribe" is loaded and, honestly, bullshit language.

Mostly agreed, but by demanding exclusivity to be on the store at all, it does give these offers a slightly shadier tinge.

It makes sense for EGS to want exclusives in order to gain some foothold in the market, but the fact that they're allowing AAA titles to ship on Steam and GoG while demanding exclusivity for indies isn't a great sign about how much better and fairer a platform EGS will be.

[mharr]

It's been a way out of the Indiepocalypse for a lot of studios now, if it means a third title from Double Damage I'm fully on board with that. Just maybe don't have the guy who's going to snark about 'downloading a free installer being too hard' in charge of PR statements. Kinda poking the rabid idiot gaming mongoose with a stick there.

[Brantly B.]

demanding exclusivity to be on the store at all

Right there. If Valve tried to do this the DoJ would (or at least should) ram a spike up their ass. I get the frustration with Valve, but this is a serious case of bringing in foxes to eat the rabbits.

[Yoji]

The Constant - A Dreamcast Deferred

Alexis was playing this last night while she fell asleep. I only caught about half of it before I fell asleep too, but I know The Constant isn't bad.

[beatbandito]

I think I like this more than the game or the song separately.

[Mongrel]

So Steam's got a global outage going on today (no explanation yet), and I just wanted to ask if any of you feel like Steam has become or is becoming increasingly less reliable?

I feel like I've been seeing more and longer random Steam disconnects over the past year or so and these outages are really annoying because I still find that Steam chat takes of vastly less memory and bandwidth than Discord for single-person convos, so I still use it heavily as my primary gaming comms, even for non-Steam games. Plus I tend to have Steam on anyway.

I guess there's TS of course for even less overhead, but that's become kind of a running gag instead of a useful app, sadly - a communication app is only as useful as the number of people on it.

[Brantly B.]

If outages are a concern then Discord is probably not going to be a more preferable communication tool.

[François]

I can't say I've had any technical problems with Steam lately, or even today for that matter, so that outage stuff is news to me. I've even been downloading for half the day and the remaining time estimates are pretty much where I expect them to be, which would indicate I haven't lost my connection for any significant length of time. I don't want to be the "works fine on my end!" guy, but... I... guess I'm gonna be anyway?

I mean, #steamdown is all over Twitter so clearly something major happened but I have no cause for complaints at this time. Keeping my fingers crossed!

[Thad]

Damn, I'd hoped the Dragon Quest series' longstanding trend of remaking old games in the new engine would continue and, now that we've got 7 and 8 in the 9 engine, that would mean starting over at 1 with the 11 engine.

Instead we get phone ports.

Meanwhile, it sounds like there's actual effort going into the Trials of Mana remake? The Square side of SE putting thought and effort into remakes while the Enix side puts out "over-filtered, poorly-stretched, clashing asset pixel vomit" feels like some Freaky Friday shit.

[mharr]

Cube World is unexpectedly coming out tomorrow after years of quarterly to biannual teasers for upcoming features but no updates, and apparently in the last few months Wolfram von Funck (Best dev name ever) has scrapped all of that and made a start on converting his likeminecraftbut open world ARPG into a... roguelite? Kinda? The infinite map's divided into a bunch of pretty small bordered regions now and when you cross from one to another your character gets reset to almost nothing unless you beat the dungeon, earning a permanent sideways boost like +10% breath holding. (It might not be exactly 10% I'm not sure.)

Oh yes, and Wolfram has already marked himself as a target for the usual suspects by publically discussing his mental health. Sooo that's going to be a gamer bro trash fire.

[Mongrel]

Ahahahahahaha

[Thad]

That sounds like a fancy way of saying that there will be some kind of lookahead mechanism. There are emulators that do this to offset latency; they run multiple possible input states a few frames in advance and then show whichever one corresponds to the input the player actually provides.

I suppose, in theory, if you threw enough hardware at it you could run multiple possible input states at a time, a few frames in advance, on a high-performance modern game.

You might even be able to compensate for streaming latency by sending those multiple possible states to the client in advance. Obviously you couldn't send multiple full video feeds at once for simple bandwidth reasons, but all possible input states for a single frame are going to be pretty similar; some sort of video compression method that sends something like "base frame + diffs for different variations" might work.

I think Google has the resources to do some interesting research in this area. But every word in that quote is ridiculous hyperbole. "Faster and more responsive than local hardware" -- no, because whatever tricks Google is doing to fight latency, game developers and console designers are working on it too. "Within a year or two" seems awfully optimistic. And "negative latency" is just dumb.

[Mongrel]

Also, equating that predictive frames as you describe is the same as predictive input where the software actually replaces your inputs entirely is not only hilariously dumb, it'll only offend the piss out of purists (and even some filthy casuals too, I imagine).

[Brantly B.]

Ironically the pro gamers are a much better fit for this model. The noobs will keep wondering why Mario's doing a kick when they said punch and will give up and go play a lag-tolerant FPS instead.

There actually is a slight chance the game could be more responsive if it's actually displaying those lookahead frames because consoles and displays have an inherent 1-3 frame latency (much more if your display doesn't have a really optimized HDMI decoder). But I have no idea how the gaming public in general would react to "a certain amount of the time you're seeing a split second ahead into the wrong future".

[Mongrel]

Oh I don't know. They might not be all that fazed by it given we've all been staring into the wrong future for the last couple decades.

[Thad]

*Lavos shriek*